The details of Pablo Picasso’s public and private life are by now well known. No artist of parallel celebrity (is there one?) has been so written aboutoften enough in records as delightful to read as they are fundamental to art history. This is especially true of the memoirs written by the women in his life. Fernande Olivier, Picasso’s earliest companion of fame, spilled the beans in Picasso et ses amis (Picasso and Friends, 1930), recounting his Bateau-Lavoir high jinksprize fights, recreational drugsduring the first decades of the twentieth century, when he and Braque were inventing Cubism. In 1964, Françoise Gilot, mother of two of Picasso’s children, wrote (with Carlton Lake) the stunning Life with Picasso, which concerns the gray years of World War II and its sunny aftermath in France. Now in her nineties, Gilot remains a rigorous artist and the costar of